University of Virginia Library

5305. MISSOURI QUESTION, Federalists and.—

Nothing has ever presented so
threatening an aspect as what is called the
Missouri question. The federalists, completely
put down and despairing of ever rising
again under the old divisions of Whig and
Tory, devised a new one of slave-holding
and non-slave-holding States, which, while it
had a semblance of being moral, was at the
same time geographical, and calculated to
give them ascendency by debauching their old
opponents to a coalition with them. Moral
the question certainly is not, because the removal

of slaves from one State to another, no more than their removal from one country
to another, would never make a slave of
one human being who would not be so without
it. Indeed, if there were any morality in
the question it is on the other side; because
by spreading them over a larger surface their
happiness would be increased, and the burden
for their future liberation lightened by bringing
a greater number of shoulders under it.
However, it served to throw dust into the
eyes of the people and to fanaticize them,
while to the knowing ones it gave a geographical
and preponderant line of the Potomac
and Ohio, throwing fourteen States to the
North and East, and ten to the South and
West. With these, therefore, it is merely a
question of power; but with this geographical
minority it is a question of existence. For
if Congress once goes out of the Constitution
to arrogate a right of regulating the condition
of the inhabitants of the States, its majority
may, and probably will, next declare
that the condition of all men within the
United States shall be that of freedom; in
which case all the whites south of the Potomac
and Ohio must evacuate their States,
and most fortunate those who can do it
first. And so far this crisis seems to be advancing.—
To Albert Gallatin. Ford ed., x, 177.
(M. Dec. 1820)